 My name is Mark Matthews, I'm the Executive Director of the H.C. Coombs Policy Forum, which is, but tomorrow will be our first year of operations where, as many of you will probably know, we're a strategic collaboration between the Australian Government and the A&U. Basically we're here to sort of enhance the interactions in the policy space between the A&U and the Australian Government and perhaps down the future widely at the state and territory level and we work in partnership. We do all the things that think tanks normally do, including public lectures, a lot of policy-focused projects and various other closed-door workshops. Before I say anything else, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, on which we're sitting now, the non-O.R. people, and pay my respects to them. And I'd also like to acknowledge Trisha Berman from the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. Trisha is not only, I met Trisha, who's very interested in the innovation, in the innovation industry, who's both in public sector and private sector terms, or the late 90s. I remember being with Trisha at the Innovation Summit in 2000. And Trisha being at DISA, we work with the whole of government, but we have a special relationship with DISA. Not only we have a very good and healthy relationship with a number of people in DISA, but they also fund us, so that's a particularly special relationship. And we mustn't ever, ever forget that. So, and this is actually something this event and another event that we're doing shortly, we're actually doing at the request of DISA to help you, I guess, reach, you know, with David, reach a large number of people with little hassle for yourselves, I would say. So, look, it gives me great pleasure to introduce David Aubrey. I first came across, first time I met David, well, last night was the first time I met David. David, for his work, he did with Jeff Mulgham, when he was with the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit in the UK, which I found very interesting, bringing in that private sector innovation perspective and laying that over what we do, what we do in the public sector, I think, was very refreshing. Jeff Mulgham subsequently, I think it was that in the original report also, but the public sector has a longer history of innovation than the private sector. I remember Jeff did a useful provocation on that and making that point for National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts later on. But David has got a very, very wide and varied and really rich career and it's on the fly, so I won't go through it all. But basically, he's incredibly expert on this whole issue of applying innovation thinking in the public sector, in particular, I think the education and welfare domains would be a fair assessment. He's a board director of the Innovation Unit Limited, company in the UK, associate of the Institute of Government, visiting professor in innovation studies at King's College in London, design and development director of the Global Education Leaders Program, Snowgelp, and as I mentioned from 2002 to 2005, was a principal advisor to the UK Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, which is where he wrote that really quite a landmark paper with Jeff Mulgham. So it would give me great pleasure to welcome David Aubrey to the A&U. Thank you. I think I switched the mic on. Okay, very good to be here. An honour to be here, really, to give the lecture for the H.C. Coombs Policy Forum and for the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. I've got it. All right. What I'm about to talk about, I don't think H.C. Coombs necessarily would have recognised because it owes more probably for those who are interested in the academic genesis of this, to Joseph Schumpeter rather than to J.N. Keynes in terms of the economics of innovation. But what I want to talk about really is the, when this rolls through, there we go, is about creating the conditions for radical public service innovation. But I'd like you, at the beginning, before I start to have 10 seconds pause, while you get in your heads a public service organisation. It could be a school, it could be a hospital, it could be a prison, it could be a government department. It doesn't matter what it is, but what I want you to do, if you will, is just to hold in your heads, through the course of the talk that I give, a department, a unit, a team, and to think about what is it that would encourage it, or people within it, to be innovative, to innovate and to adopt and adapt innovations. Because this rather sterile title, this rather abstract title, at some point has to have purchase on schools, hospitals, local authorities, prisons, police forces, whatever it may be. So just hold one in your head, doesn't matter what it is. And ask yourself, as we go through, what is it that would induce the school, the university, or whatever it may be, to become more innovative? So, but why, why at all has this, why has this subject become so critical over the last few years? Why are there perhaps as many people as there are in this lecture theatre, why now, as opposed to ten years ago, are governments across the world talking about public service innovation in the UK, where I spend at least some of my time, I feel as though there's a sort of embedded macro in some central government computer that if a paragraph of a white paper or a bill is written without innovation in it, this macro comes into operation and inserts the word innovation. It's become a really critical word. And why is that word there? And I'd argue the reason why it's become so important at this time is we are in a sense in the middle of a perfect storm around public services, to which radical innovation provides a form of solution. And the important characteristics of that, and I'm going to go through them in more detail, are the sets of different pressures that come to bear in the beginning of the 21st century on public services in a way that has not been the case at least since perhaps the Second World War and a different situation. I just want to say a little bit about one or two of these just to give us the flavour of how this is impacting, remember to keep your organisation, your institution or your team in your head at this point. There are, for all these sorts of institutions, a set of long-term challenges. There are changing demographics in every society in the world, in developed societies in the main, this is a phenomenon of ageing, a phenomenon about an ageing population taking over from a younger population in terms of the proportion of the population with concomitant issues around pensions, around retirement, around benefits, around welfare, about lifelong learning and so forth. About obesity, about long-term conditions. There are changes in the ways in which individuals relate to public service professionals. There are differences about what a student in a school can access in terms of information and learning from what there was 20 years ago with or without teachers. There are patients who can access as much if not more information about their condition and their disease than any doctor. There is a change induced by changes in private sector and in consumer operations about the way in which people relate to expertise and authority. There are different expectations about access. Why when I can do my banking 24 hours a day? Can't I do my schooling or my healthcare 24 hours a day? And there are a set of persistent issues different in different countries and different places which public services and the public sector have tried to tackle often without success. In the UK, drug and alcohol abuse despite many interventions has continued to increase. Obesity, despite many interventions, both childhood and adult obesity has continued to increase. And then although as if those three were not enough, of course, in the last three or four years for a variety of reasons, in different countries, we have seen a massive fiscal constraint on public services. And therefore, the aim of what we're talking about is not just some incremental improvements and changes in the ways in which we deliver or think about the public sector, but about radical innovation that can produce significantly better outcomes for significantly lower costs. That's the real challenge that we're all facing. How do we equip children with 21st century skills, not just the basics of literacy, numeracy and maths, but about problem solving, about team collaboration, about critical thinking and so forth? How do we embrace the fact that health services in Australia, in the UK and in the Western world were developed to deal with infectious and acute diseases where the vast majority of their expenditure now is on chronic and long term conditions? Where hospitals are antiquated institutions in relation to most of the needs of most of the population. So this sort of radical and compelling innovation significantly better outcomes significantly lower costs. This is the challenge. And what do I want to spend, therefore, the next 20 minutes on, really, is to take you inside a set of findings from research over the last few years that I've looked at now some over 40 high performing innovative organisations and 10 or 12 high performing innovative sectors and has tried to distill from that some of the characteristics that define those systems, those sectors, those organisations. So what are the common characteristics of high performing innovative organisations, sectors and systems? And I just want to talk about about three or four minutes on each of five buckets of factors. I want to talk a bit about cultural leadership, about support and investment, about rewards and incentives, about regulation and openness and about citizen and user engagement. Because in all these buckets, our characteristics of organisation systems and sectors go back, think about your school and your hospital and all the rest, which determine whether they are or or influence whether they are and the people within them are innovative and or adopt and adapt innovations. So let's just say something about cultural leadership. So this is interviews with top managers, senior managers, lead professionals in 40 to 45 organisations that are generally recognised as high performing innovative, some are private sectors, some are public sectors, some are third and socials. And what's so remarkable in these interviews, I remember the term is these people are passionate. What defines the space of innovation is that the leaders of those organisations are passionate about the outcomes, about the goals, about the ambitions, about the aspirations. They're clear about what those should be, but they're sort of relaxed about the process we're getting there. Unlike many organisations that are coming in the public sector, which are obsessed with process controls and methods, these people in general are people who have fantastically aspirational goals, are very clear about them, but I encourage people to find different ways of meeting. It is in that space that innovation begins to exist. I'm proud enough at the moment to or it's a privilege at the moment to work in New York City with the Department of Education and the Chancellor of the Department of Education in New York City, who have presided over 10 years of the most dramatic improvement in educational performance of any city in the world over the last 10 years, actually has moved to a position of developing a bold innovation strategy because that pace of change was insufficient to get to the place where he wanted to, where 100% of children in New York would graduate from high school within four years with the schools and knowledge necessary for the 21st century. He sets very ambitious goals, but he doesn't define the process and the detail of getting there. That space is where innovation takes place. Secondly, they encourage experimentation and informed and bounded risk-taking, they tolerate, this is a, I've never got a right phrase for this next bit, which is about tolerating failure, right, because they know, they don't tolerate failure in the sense of, here's something that isn't working well, let's leave it alone, but they tolerate failure because in the sense that it's only through the process of learning from failure, learning from mistakes, learning from getting our prototypes wrong, that we begin to accumulate the evidence of creating a more powerful innovation. They focus on a limited number of priorities and challenges. These aren't people who talk about an innovative organisation as such. They have great clarity, even the great example that's often used, which is of Google, much fame for giving all its employees 20% of their time to do whatever they want, to be innovative in any way they want. If you then go and talk to the person who, at the time I interviewed him, had this great title director of futures in Google and say to him, what's your, what's the strategy for innovation in Google? He will tell you the three things that they're really about. They will encourage others to think about other things, but basically they're focusing most of their resource and most of their effort on a limited number of domains. And these leaders, the senior managers, these lead professionals are hungry, thirsty, exploring all the time the external environment. They are reaching out to other sectors, other organisations, other countries. They're reaching out to the front line of their organisations. These are people who are externally and front line oriented in their being. And finally, and I may come back to this if I have time, they maintain a split screen narrative. They're not just about innovation. They're about how do we continue to improve in our day to day operations and services and products and so forth, at the same time as building innovative capacity to address present and future challenges. So, culture and leadership are critically important. To deal with support and investment and rewards and incentives. It's definitely the case in these organisations and these sectors and these systems that there is always, or nearly always, a budget, a fund, a way of distributing money to innovation. That is, they are able to identify these regions, approximately how much of their totality of resource they spend on innovation. And people in the audience who probably have much more up-to-date figures than I, but if we look at about five years ago, we look at private sector and companies in private sector and high-performing innovative companies, their spend on innovation would be somewhere often between three and as much as 15 or even 20 percent of turnover on their innovation effort. I thought we were doing really well in the NHS in the UK, a hundred billion pound organisation when we managed to get a fund of 20 million for innovation, but that's a drop in the ocean compared with what we see high-performing innovative organisations spending. Money is very important. As important, if not more important than the money, is the ability to apply methods and support, the disciplines and approaches that are necessary to enhance the likely effectiveness of innovation. These can be incubators, innovation intermediaries, there's a whole raft of organisations that have developed in the public sector over the last 10 years that have brought to bear disciplines from service design, from ethnography, from project typing, from modelling, from simulation, to bear on to the process of public sector innovation, an area which is still relatively amateur. And I say this because, in a sense, there's a little bit of history of venture capital that is interesting in this. When I was interviewing some venture capitalists, one sticks in my mind of saying to a venture capitalist, just tell me the history of it and tell me two stories that are very important. Firstly, they started off believing that the way to operate as a venture capitalist was to find people with good ideas and drop some money on them, wait for them to make a profit and then get their return on investment. And he said they came rapidly very clear that just because somebody had a good idea, did not mean that they have the bunch of skills and expertise to take it into a marketable or serviceable product or service, and that therefore venture capital began to develop the process of wrapping around potential innovators, the skills, expertise, knowledges, people and expertise that would enable those people to be more successful in their innovation process. So as well as our phones, we have to think about incubator zones, laboratories, whatever they may be, the design centre that the department is putting in place here is a good example that brews to bear some of those disciplined approaches on innovation. And the second story, which relates to the risk portfolio to keep in mind, second story that the venture capitalist told me was in answer to the question how successful are you, how successful has your investment been over the last few years, he said in the last 10 years over 60% of our investments have been successful. And I said that's very impressive and he said no it's terrible. And the reason he said it was terrible he said it's too high because if you want really powerful innovation or really powerful investment you have to be able to take a chance on some pretty wild cards in this process and his view was that the success ratio of their investments was in a sense a marker they weren't taking big enough risks. And that balance of risk and reward of that portfolio of innovations is also a very important part of public sector innovation. What I said about culture and leadership think head teacher of school, think commander of police station, think chief executive of agency is all very important. What I said about support and investment is all very important in encouraging people to be innovative. But I also want to talk about as it were adoption adaptation what encourages individuals, teams and organizations not to be innovative of themselves but to adopt and adapt other people's innovations because most innovations spread for a process of adaptation and adoption I'll come back to unless they do. So what we find in organizations that are successful high performing innovative is that there are rewards and incentives in these organizations and systems and sectors not just for being an innovator but for adopting and adapting innovation. We have lots of prizes and awards for innovations in the public sector it's great it's encouraged more innovation it's very good but what it does is to continue to celebrate the person who's the originator of the innovation rather than those organizations and teams that would adopt and adapt those innovations. We know there are mechanisms that we could do this at the individual level and at the team level and the organizational level. It still amazes me that in general hospital schools police forces local governments there is no real incentive other than public good and public mindfulness which is a really important feature for improved results. Most funding systems in most parts of the world are neutral or perverse with regards to institutions really improving their performance and doing that is a really critical part of creating conditions for radical innovation. These are not just financial these are also reputation rewards that are in place and finally I will put in this bracket that we know that one of the things that drives innovation in different sectors and different systems and different organizations is granular comparative performance information and by granular I don't mean at the level of the hospital or the school that actually we know that although we're rather fond of them in governments of sort of star ratings or judgments comparative judgments about hospitals or schools or police forces or whatever actually what matters to the public and to the users and professionals in those organizations is much more what's happening in the particular specialty with the particular consultant or in the particular clinic or in the particular subject in the school because that does two things one of which I will say a word or two more about later on about the way in which the public and users respond to that but it also harnesses peer and professional challenge and pressure that is innovation occurs or get spread in part because I realize that the doctor down the road is achieving better clinical outcomes than I am through the operations so comparative performance information at the level of the subject or the specialty or the service or the unit is a critical part of this okay the advantage of this where we to be able to get it right especially if we have some financial reward for improvement in performance is that rather than the mechanism we have at the moment for most public services which is a form of funding that is in a sense a sort of grant funding you would begin to build a cycle of return on investment that you would be able to invest in innovation which were it to be able to improve performance and if there is a premium attached to improvements in performance that can be recycled back into the fund and we see some governments and some organizations beginning to experiment in those sorts of domains in public services okay this is slightly more complex and this one I have to remember what Olivia told me at the beginning about how far I can walk all right okay so I want to say something about the structure of these sectors if you look at high performing innovative sectors and systems they have very thin sectors actually for now you're going to have to have two things in your head you've got your school or whatever it was in that and now I want you to think about a sector think for the moment just about software or media and in these sectors which are high performing innovative they have peculiarly they have very similar structures that is they have a core of a small number of large dominant players people who are occupying an oligopolistic call often four or five major players and around the edge a wide periphery of specialist suppliers niche providers startups and so on so we've got this if you've got this in your head in your sector you've got a few firms or companies or organizations who are providing most of it but are in competition with one another in an oligopolistic sense and you have a wide periphery of startups coming in of people who are specialist providers niche suppliers whatever it may be and there is fluidity across both boundaries there are people exiting and entering that periphery all the time and there is significant merger and acquisition activity and demerger activity going on between the core oligopolistic core and this periphery of smaller organizations that's why I need to walk so if you start in the beginning of the 20th century in the sector that you've chosen doesn't actually matter which one it is I'm going to hold in my head motor manufacturing in Britain in 1900 you have something in excess of 200 motor manufacturers all of roughly similar size and as you march through the 20th century the structure of motor manufacturing moves more and more towards this oligopolistic core and wide periphery yeah get aggregation into the center and dispersal around the edge you do this for motor manufacturing you do this for pharmaceuticals you do this for media you do this for software you do this for newspapers do whatever those sectors you like there are very technical indicators in economics for measuring these levels of aggregation and disaggregation around the edge and if you then look at health or education and as you march through the 20th century actually the basic sectoral structure despite lots of peripheral administrative restructurings the basic structure of operation stays remarkably the same and why is this important in terms of innovation or more important why is this important in terms of the diffusion of innovation is because the problem that we have in the public sector about this disaggregation means that the mechanism that is taking place in other sectors which is the reason why innovation diffuses much farther isn't that that is we just have to be careful in these things which are now filmed if you think of a large one of the largest software manufacturers they of themselves are not particularly innovative but what they are is fantastically acquisitive so that we're you to dream up in your garage a really powerful piece of software whereas if you are in your doctor's surgery as it were it will take you forever to talk to your colleagues and so forth I'll say more about that in a moment let's get it there these nice people from this imaginary giant software company come along and say to you we can make you a very rich person if you will give us your property and they take it away from you and push it across 100 million platforms overnight the process of acquisition is the process of scaling the process in which they encode those into wider domains of operation is important the ability to expand market share for startups to grow into these spaces is very great in I do a lot of work as Mark mentioned in education and I used to ask people in departments of education as it's going around if there was a really if somebody found a really powerful way in one school of taking people age five and getting them to a sort of graduate maths level by age 10 how long would it take to spread through your entire education system to which the answers generally vary between a decade or more and never and partly that's because what we have even in those post-marketized systems of public services is massively high levels of disaggregation which are effectively competing small units which have no ability to scale so this process is very important in terms of the way in which public services operate and therefore the financial market and economic regulation of public services which is about a million miles away from where most people start off thinking about innovation is absolutely key to whether innovation happens and whether it spreads think about your school in terms of what it really cares about cares about getting its funding it cares about its examination and it cares about its inspection report these are the big drivers not the fund over here which is about innovation not somebody just standing up and saying it's a good thing so unless we're attentive to those wider conditions and determinants of innovation we won't really foster high levels of public sector innovation and its diffusion last bucket Olivia how am I doing on time? I'm okay good cool okay the only thing that's interesting about these high-performing innovative organizations is their relationship to their publics to their users to their markets to their citizens I think in general in public services over the last decade we have got much much better at believing it is important to engage with our users though with some prominence exceptions some of which we can find in Australia because as we are still in my view are a long way behind some of the best practice in the private and the third sector behind what innovative organizations really do in this these organizations the apples the googles other high-performing innovative organizations definitely don't send out surveys and ask for people to return them they definitely don't get a group of people who are relatively satisfied with the service and won't cause too much trouble coming in and talking to them they generally don't for offering people blank sheets of paper and saying how would you like Google to be and they generally don't offer detailed plans that ask people to comment on sort of clause 1.7.3 about this particular point and there's still too much of that in public sector that goes on by way of sort of what's called user engagement what these organizations do do is they move more and more to both co-create and to co-produce with their users indeed the notion of users or customers begins to dissolve as far as possible in this they see the ways of interaction between professionals designers and users and the public as absolutely central and key to both the design process and the delivery of the services or the products and so forth secondly they don't go for the usual suspects some people have heard me on this before but Apple don't like me as a user because I just tell them I love my iPhone is great and if only it was a bit thinner and lighter it'd be even more wonderful they like people who are really dissatisfied who say it's a complete rubbish of the products it doesn't do this it doesn't do that and I want to use it to list where it doesn't do it in that sort of way and so forth these organizations reach out to their most extreme most leasing edge most difficult most obstructive users because in both places cite the gems of how one can build things for the future if you've got a screw in your head think if a school could tackle somebody with major learning impediments maybe learning difficulties disadvantaged families etc the chances are we'll get it right for everyone if we can do in our health service with the person who has multiple conditions and is homeless we can probably get it right for everyone else so reaching out to the extreme and the most difficult the most disadvantage of the most complex is a way of engendering radical innovation and in fact by talking about just one other part of that and just say one one conclusion this I've tried to identify along the way here two problems one is relatively easy so we've got a lot better at it which is about increasing the flow of innovation increasing the innovation pipeline most of the policies for innovation have been developed by governments across the world over the last 10 years have been supplied side policies about innovation there have been ways of increasing the volume of innovation that takes place in public services but actually as I alluded to earlier on the problem is not one of the volume of new innovations between Octi Moran volume of innovations per se the problem in public service in public sector is a problem in the main about diffusion is about the way in which innovations tend to spread or not spread tend to stay locked on the location of origin that's an innovation in one part of a government department often doesn't spread to another never mind to adjacent government departments never mind to adjacent states or territories never mind to other countries that what happens in one doctor's surgery often stays locked there you can go back five years later it won't it will still be in that one surgery not spread for other things this is a problem the problem of diffusion of innovation and therefore continuing to look at supply side issues and continuing to believe that this is just sorted out by information is I would argue missing the point that as well as the issues that we've talked about about the regulation and sexual shape my stuff about oligopoly and periphery actually we need to be thinking about how do we mobilize and encourage the demand side to pull innovation through and I'll end by two stories one of which I told so forgive me for those who were with me last night I told last night and one other a few years ago I was privileged enough to hear the head of research for a global pharmaceutical company talk about the future of pharmacological research but he starts off with a slide that was about 10 high impact drugs and how long it took from clinical approval of those drugs so then going into widespread practice no so evidence is their clinical approval how long to widespread practice and it varied from these are all drugs that have major impact on large numbers of the population it took from several months to several years the difference between so I asked well what is it that makes a difference and he said we haven't done any really systematic research but I'd point out one very strong correlation and that's a correlation between the shortness of the time to diffuse to move from clinical approval to widespread practice and the strength of patient organizations in those areas not the strength of clinical networks not the strength of the number of academic professional conferences but the strength of patient organizations so one of the fastest diffusion rates drugs was anti-retroviral drugs for people living with HIV and AIDS not because the evidence was more overwhelming it was in all the other cases overwhelming not because doctors heard more about it or received more information but because the network and community of people living with HIV and AIDS is strongly network and empowered and moves information and demand amongst itself it creates it goes to the doctor the clinic and says I have heard it might be in London or Paddington or wherever it may be and says I have heard that this treatment was given to my friend my colleague the person I know over there they become the demanders of this system second example there's a lot I think you call forgive me if I get this wrong I think you call them self-directed services in Australia and I think in the UK we talk about personal personal or individual budgets this is about giving people with often with a number of disabilities or multiple conditions the ability to control how that resource is deployed whether which bit or public services they might want to assemble this innovation whilst it was thought about by and developed in some settings by some professionals actually has taken off across the world not because of as it were governments or public sector broadcast methods dissemination of this but by very active working of groups of people living with disabilities and multiple conditions arguing for advocating for and mobilizing that control themselves so my last looping point on this is to say that if we can find ways of involving users in the co-creation and co-delivery of public services not only will the innovations be enriched in that process and more radical but they become if we can find ways of strengthening and empowering those organizations then they become the advocates and the mobilizers of demand my concluding sentence therefore is to leave you with two things one is to say if we're thinking about really improving increasing innovation and its diffusion in public services what we need to do strangely is not just more R&D but strengthen and empower organizations and two if as government agencies we want to foster innovation and stimulate diffusion we don't need to just look at as it were those things that look like direct levers but those conditions be they funding regimes regulatory regimes and accountability regimes that will impact across them I'll leave it there thank you wonderful thank you very much David you've given us so much to think about and people are still here despite it being lunch having the right impact we have time for questions so I'd like to invite people to ask questions of David I think we also have a roving Mike that's correct so questions up here in the middle you talked about getting the people with a a disagreement involved people who might not necessarily agree with where you're going for a lot of public service organizations that's a very political thing to do how do you negotiate that challenge well it goes back to my point about the I think what I talked about earlier was informed and bounded risk taking as I was showing with Trisha earlier there's various sayings that have become popular in governments and public public sectors across the world one of which is we want everyone to be an innovator I don't we want every organization to be innovative I don't why don't I want that because actually there's lots of things that need to routinely carry on day to day and just be sort of routinely consistently improved so we need to find spaces in which zones and incubators these are all different terms to be used around the world in which we assemble the conditions under which radical innovation for significantly improved outcomes the significantly lower costs are achieved so my sell to ministers and politicians is on the basis not of innovation per se which despite everything I've said I think is deeply uninterested but on the ability to radically improve people's lives which I think is powerfully interesting and most ministers agree with if you can create that bounded space then I think it is possible to bring together people I'm not talking about politicians so much and those disagreements I'm talking about people with different perspectives and I just want to give one very quick example of this sorry education is talking my head at the moment in schools right I was working with a group of schools in the UK might need a translation from somebody and we were trying to think about different what different models of sort of arranging schooling and we brought in someone from easy jet budget airline what's your equivalent here jet this jet start a budget airline sorry jet start okay not because and as I said this many times that's not because I want easy jet to run the schools I try to hate the idea of easy jet running schools but bringing in the perspective from other areas is really important in terms of freeing ourselves up and so easy jet and the headteachers were very skeptical but this guy from easy jet said he's trying to say I don't understand why you start your classes all at the same time said you know we never try and get all our planes up in the air at the same time so the headteachers go well you know you've got teachers and rooms and things like that we've got planes and ports and so on and the point of it was to start to free up people's ability to see these things differently so as a great advert I think by Xerox a couple of years ago in the States when they were trying to design new interfaces for their computers of their machines and they said they ever said wanted artists dramatists poets playwrights historians sociologists etc and then in little words at the bottom it says and maybe your system's analyst yeah right because they know that where radical innovation comes from is those sort of really contrasting and different perspectives from users from different professions from other sectors but in a bounded space it's not about doing that sorry we'll speed up sorry I just wanted to respond to your notion of user groups driving demand and it just seems to me that not all user groups are the same I thought that the example you gave about retrovirals was particularly interesting I mean you know some user groups you're dealing with a group of users who are very disadvantaged who have very little capacity maybe to advocate on their own behalf that may need a lot of assistance with that that may not have any financial resources or you might be any dealing with the community as you were with retrovirals for example that's got a history of political advocacy that's concentrated in one geographical area has a lot of professional and financial resources to draw on so if that's a really important factor it seems to me you have to deal with the fact that not all user groups have the same capacity to drive demand 100% agree and some of those groups that you've identified have been the most powerful in co-creating new solutions so I think of particularly in the area of mental health with people with very severe learning difficulties who have really helped reframe what mental health services look like and so forth I think of some work both in the states and in northern Europe with homeless networks and so forth but the important thing to say here is our job if we are serious about innovation is finding ways of strengthening and empowering those organizations and not as you say assuming that they are all got sufficient resource and so forth but it was an attempt to sort of move our focus of innovation policy away from a sort of supply side area to a sort of a slightly more unusual and difficult domain about working with these groups and networks and organizations in such a way but you're completely right they are very different they all have they are all an asset it's the important part of this which we fail to mobilize of in our efforts around this Hi can you hear me yeah I found that really interesting because I keep reflecting on where we're at and you hear the terminology it's the same here as in the UK citizen centric services joined up government services linking and collaborating with community organizations which is where the innovation is in service delivery where are we falling short why aren't we able to really make that shift using these notions which are very similar to what you're talking about where are we falling short well the two areas that I think we're still grappling with is the bit that's around this really hard question about the sort of structural shape and sort of sexual regulation issues and how those hinder and enable innovation and that sounds like a very arcane and technical issue and I used to think it was but as I talk with public service organizations sort of here and in the UK and around the world actually what makes the difference to the teacher the clinician and so forth sits in that domain in a very powerful important way so we've got pockets of innovation but we haven't been able to really spread that I think because the second is it's pretty amateurish still I mean we've got better but it is pretty amateurish if I go off to organizations in sort of well-known innovative organizations some in the few in the public sector but mainly in the private and third sector they have really thought about how do you what are the processes how do you do prototyping in a really effective way not pilots which is what we're doing publicly how do you use modeling how do you use simulation how do you use ethnographic research how do you use this there's something about the application of the work that we have used it today but the word I use a lot when I'm talking more detail about support innovation it's a sort of local organizational level it's about discipline we've said too not too much we said a lot about creativity and ingenuity and imagination of last few years we've learned to know let's liberate people's creativity I'm all for that but we know that innovation also comes out of a process of applying the discipline on top of that creative energy I think we've got a long way to go in doing that but we are getting better I almost wanted to ask the reverse of that because in spirit of comparative performance information I often get really excited about the things I find going on around in Australia and often get people say oh yeah but you know England so much farther ahead in America so much farther ahead and I think we need to really push some of the really bright spots that we've got around our own public service have you been able to get a hint about what they are from your perspective wait a minute yes no I just I just want to caution the push bit all right I just want to caution the push bit here because I guess this goes back to my point about we've we've been very supply side thinking in our actions around innovation and not sufficiently demand side and if you track what we've done about trying to diffuse those fantastic pockets or even examples of innovation more broadly we've used websites and pamphlets and exhibitions and seminars and workshops and lectures and so we know the research is quite clear that these are of limited effectiveness all right people have become very fond of innovation exhibitions innovation expos you can get very high levels of satisfaction from people attending those but all the evidence is on follow-up surveys that nobody does anything with it they go along and they look around like oh that's all fantastic oh that's really blinding no that's oh I'd really like to do that in my place and then go back and ask them three weeks later three weeks later a month later what's happened and they've forgotten about they've heard this inspiring thing about this great center in Perth or this fantastic new educational development in Victoria or wherever it may be but it sort of sits there because it's too it's it's not just about information it's about a change in mindset and ways of thinking it's a change in working practices of a change in power relationships that's really at stake and therefore we have to think about how do we in how do we create the spaces in which those innovations occur and how do we create the pools and the incentives not just the pushes of information so I am for celebrating don't get me wrong because I think there's some fantastic things in the public sector is as innovative as the private or third sector it just doesn't diffuse is one of the major problems there I have two sort of linked questions but first I guess the background is important so I I was on the steering committee for a decade long study of radical innovation in private industry the second phase of which was how do you how do companies establish a sustained competency in doing radical innovation the prime finding out of that second phase was the enormous difficulties of organizations of simultaneously having a culture which fosters operational excellence doing the current stuff really really well and the ability to explore and do the radical innovation what you call so so I guess the first question is how can organizations do these things simultaneously and the subsets the link question is a couple of times you you seem to have said well you set up this bounded separate space or lab something which is bounded and a bit separate where you can do these experiments a number of companies in the study so both companies in the study some did separation some didn't and the ones which did this refuse to separate they refuse to an IBM is probably the leading example of this they refuse to separate because of the difficulties of transfer and learning through integrating back into the to the mainstream organization which seems to go to the heart of one of your main points about how do you actually get the the diffusion out so you know if your answer is to the cultural issue something separate then how do you handle the the diffusion issue and I wish I had easy answers to either of those questions both of which are really important and both of which my experience the questions that are bugging leading professionals and senior managers across public services the bit you said much more elegantly than I'm about to but which was my point about maintaining the split screen initiative let me let me go back to my new york city example just because it's fresh in my head right there they've got a process that has increased significantly improvement in schools over last ten years but they don't feel it's good enough and isn't going to address future challenges so they were trying to think about how do we do that in a how do we keep the pressure on for most of schools to continue doing that whilst building some capacity for future so that's where they got to this notion about we'll have a innovation zone sort of we'll bound this area off we'll do the interesting innovative things over there but it's a really hard narrative to maintain because the schools that are in if you like just sitting there doing the stand improvement things are saying well why are they allowed to innovate and we aren't or there's all sorts of problems about the overall narrative you tell him that so I absolutely echo that and the problem is if you try to do it in the mainstream all the lessons are it tends to get absorbed the radical innovation is really hard so the work of Clayton Christensen for those who like following this up I think is very illuminating here in his book the innovators dilemma where he said he looks at carefully how large organizations and large systems for all sorts of reasons not least they are vested and invested in the status quo even if they meet really radical innovations tend to as it were reduce them something more conventional because it's such a threat to their sort of identity and being and behaviors and practices right so the problem about trying to do it in the mainstream and there's a problem exactly the one that you said of trying to do it on the margin not least because the problem of reintegration back into the mainstream right I think some of these become regulatory issue the one phrase I hear more and more and that the chancellor in New York articulated which I thought was good was to talk about and to think about ways in which you talk about that zone or that area being championed and authorized by the main organization and working on behalf of and finding ways in which you link therefore the innovative activity is going on there back into the mainstream not as an end product because a process issue all the way through is pretty important but I absolutely think it's where I hear governments throughout the world public service organizations throughout world absolutely trying to address this conundrum so I think it's a really really really real issue but we'll hear from two more of them I do apologize to others but I'll stick around thank you thank you for the opportunity I'd like to go back to your comments around the growing excessive push type in activities that are celebrating innovation as a way of trying to grow the idea of increasing innovation I'm interested in the in the development of poor kinds of activities and how that might be introduced into the education system and into schools I mean any parent knows that show and tell at school is really important to the children but isn't that really teaching them how to how to become celebrities and engage in this whole kind of push showcasing activities and are there any initiatives and things happening where children are being stimulated to think about an ideal kind of school environment parents are being asked to think about that for instance and then making choices and then examining the consequences of their choices in that and so they've start to learn how to become how to become creative and innovative in a structured way and I think that's right and I think that's about it's about the other side of it show and tell may have its effects but actually we know that profound and deep learning occurs through collaborative problem-based or project-based inquiry and that therefore what one's looking at in these innovation processes means creating the right sorts of collaborations that are centered on that so I think there are examples I'm sure there are examples in Australia I can't bring these mine but you know in New York and in other places there are examples of absolutely of parents of students of teachers of social entrepreneurs together figuring out what education will be like 21st century and engaging their wider audiences in that process themselves so that it's the in the several analysts are starting to use this extremely inelegant new word of inner fusion to talk about the way instead of innovation and then diffusion of the ways in which you construct communities into the innovation process itself such that in a case they are self-generating the demand so that having your user organizations not just because we want a couple of users here to make it look better but having the users there because they are genuinely trying to create those networks is a really important part of that and I think there are things going on actually in health in welfare in adult adult social care and elderly I think there are examples throughout the world of this beginning to take off in a rather profound way aided and abetted by sort of web technologies for at least for some of these groups so your perfect storm it may create the it may make innovation more desirable but it doesn't necessarily facilitate the ability to then innovate because you kind of need to be able to take a step back and in order to come up with new ideas and there really isn't the like the time or resources to kind of do that when you're just really getting by and trying to meet day to day demands do you have any comments on that? Yeah I suppose I also label this the drivers and the rest of what I was talking about is sort of the conditions or enablers of that innovation process my experience is slightly at variance with what you've said what always astounds me in all the areas of innovation I've worked in in different countries is the discretionary effort that professionals and managers and leaders will put in when the goal is an ambitious set of outcomes or aspirations that once you liberate people to operate in that space discretionary effort they will give is immense and given that I've said I'm not interested I don't want everyone to be an innovator I need a few to start that process so I do think there's something about discretionary effort if I repeat we're not I'm not interested we're not interested in innovation for its own sake therefore you should spend 10 percent of your time but to really achieve significantly better outcomes the significantly lower cost I think does really motivate people and that discretionary effort is therefore given very much David and I certainly am excited with what we've heard today I think that the important messages that David has brought to our attention is that innovation is a mechanism to achieve outcomes we as a bureaucracy are representing the state of the public sector in a way and I know the majority of it we want to achieve really good outcomes and innovation is a mechanism whereby we can achieve something that but it's about the outcomes ultimately and we mustn't forget that it's not innovation for its own purpose and sometimes you need to educate those around you about that message look David with his 40-odd years experience in this area brings the inside-outside perspective he is not a public servant he has been an academic he's working the public sector as a consultant and I think that's also a reason that he can see things with various lenses on and that's a path we have ahead of us as well we have to think of things from the citizens perspective as well as the government's perspective and so we have a real challenge but I hope this was a an uplifting experience for you and I certainly lost for us and we're very very pleased that you were able to join us today David and also I'd like to thank the Coombs policy forum because they helped bring this together and this is another inside-outside series that we have it so thank you very much David on behalf of everybody